Retail photofinishing has historically involved small scale commercial or even large scale industrial print shops, which rendered captured images onto physical media. Analog photography utilizing photographic film is developed by applying developing chemicals to the photographic film under certain ambient conditions, to make a negative of the film. The negative could then be reduced to re-create a captured photograph on a more permanent media, such as photography paper, or the like.
With the advent of digital photography, film development was replaced by direct printing of digital images. By digitizing an image, the image could be re-created with a dot printer or other suitable printing device on physical media. One great advantage of digital photography is that printers suitable to render a fair to good quality image can be manufactured very cheaply, particularly compared to costs of photographic labs for developing photographic film. Accordingly, digital photography rapidly overtook film-based photography for many applications, particular consumer photography.
Digital photography quickly became a turn-key end-user process, in which the end-user could purchase equipment to digitally capture, store and render their photographs. These digital pictures are easy to share with friends via electronic communication, print out for display, or save for long periods. However, end-user equipment does not achieve the quality that professional printing or finishing can produce, and with recent advancements in high definition photography, the disparity in quality became more pronounced; disparities in printing quality for high definition images are often detectable even by the average photographer. Although commercial photofinishing still provides high quality prints for high definition photographs, the conveniences of printing within one's own home or office are not quite matched by the average retail store experience. Thus, mass consumer use of commercial photofinishing had been somewhat limited. However, Internet commerce has significantly changed this paradigm.
Recent technological advancements in size and cost of data storage, as well as advancements in last-mile Internet bandwidth to the consumer, have enabled web-based photofinishing to flourish. Photographers can now upload digital photographs to a website, and have those images stored for sharing, later viewing, or downloading. Moreover, uploaded photographs can be provided to a commercial printer electronically, with little more manual overhead than printing out a photograph on a digital printer attached to a computer. Photographs, once rendered physically, can be mailed to consumers by the commercial printer. Utilizing electronic communication then, consumers now had access to high quality, high definition printing, with conveniences that approach home digital printing. As a result, much of modern retail photofinishing is directed toward rapidly and cost effectively generating print photographs from electronic digital images.